Half Awake
by Sophia Bee
Summary: Post season 5 finale. Blair and Chuck are unhappily married, half awake in a fake empire. Angst. Inspired by listening to The National. A lot.


They play the roles, like puppets on strings, going through the motions but not really knowing why. They sleepwalk, half awake, actors on a stage, but never able to take off the costumes or makeup when they're done with their parts. They pretend nothing is wrong. They ignore their own emptiness.

Blair smiles, glossy red lips spreading into a grin that never reaches all the way to her eyes and she thinks that she should be happy. She has everything she ever wanted, except she strangely has nothing.

Chuck never stops wanting, consumed by what he doesn't have and bored by what he does. He always wants more. He stays in the office late and sleeps in the guest room, telling Blair that he didn't want to disturb her. He seeks solace in the arms of pretty blondes with bourbon on their breath, who can't say one entire sentence without giggling. He fucks them in anonymous hotel rooms, but never cheap ones, and always pays for room service the next day when they wake up alone. He calls out her name, the woman who waits for him at home, his wife. Because he wants the girl he used to have, not the one he has now who is always vaguely vacant, never really there. He wants back the girl he lost.

They don't talk, don't look at each other in the morning and Blair doesn't tell Chuck that she can smell someone else's perfume on the shirt he threw in the hamper. Chuck doesn't tell Blair that she calls out another man's name in her sleep. There's nothing to say because they no longer care about each others secrets. Once they were about games, about leverage, about making the deepest cut. Now they are about nothing.

Cameras flash and Blair smiles again, plastic, painful, pretend. She lies, tells the world they are happy, clings to Chuck's arm, leans her head in, laughs at something he says. They are perfect, beautiful, blinding the world with their grace and charm.

They lie.

Sometimes Chuck thinks he should just tell her that he knows. He knows she never really wanted him and he's not sure why she's still there, still sleeping in his bed, still playing her role of wife and lover. Sometimes he thinks he should take one of his expensive cut crystal highballs and hurl it at the wall, watch it shatter into tiny shards that will lurk in the shadows and wind their way under his skin until they make a kind of pain that never stops. Maybe then she would look at him with something in her eyes. Fear. Hatred. Anger. Something besides the blankness.

Sometimes Blair thinks she should walk away, finally tell the truth, finally be able to live. Instead she holds onto the edges, grips them tightly until they cut through her skin, tells herself that this is what she wanted, that she didn't confuse devastation for love. She tells herself she made her choice, that it was the right one.

She is only honest in the darkness, and only when she's alone. That's when she wonders what would happen if she pushed off the covers, found her clothes and walked out of the penthouse suite, into the elevator, across the lobby and out onto the sidewalk. Would the night air feel different, nipping at her skin, burning her lungs. Would the stars sparkle more brightly. Would she finally feel alive again, not this dead husk of the person she used to be. What if she found her way to that other place, the place where he lives, knocked on the door. What if she told him she made a mistake.

Only in the darkness does she allow herself to whisper his name, to touch her lips with her fingertips, to feel his kiss again.

They live half awake in their fake empire, king and queen of nothing. They play designated roles over and over again, puppets on a string, because both Chuck and Blair have reached a point where they don't know how to do things differently. They pretend that everything is the way it was meant to be. They hold together their cracking facades with the barely tangible threads of lies and deceits.

Until one day everything crumbles.

She finds him, the one in her dreams, the one she let go. A chance meeting on the street, and when he asks how she's doing, she can't answer because suddenly the truth is trying to push through her skin, trying to flow out of her mouth, and she knows if she says anything she's going to end up saying everything. She knows that she will dissolve right in front of him. His eyes are deep and brown and they bore into her soul, and she is consumed with what it would feel like to fist her hands in his hair again, to have his lips on hers. She can't breathe, can't speak, can't move.

He tells her that he hopes she's happy and she sees the sadness in his eyes, and for the first time in months she feels something, a sharp stabbing pain that threatens to leave her gasping, and her knees are weak and she's sure any moment she's going to be lying on the hard cement sidewalk, staring at nothing, lost.

He sighs, runs a hand through his hair, says he doesn't know why he thought they could have a civil conversation in the first place, turns away from her and finally Blair manages to blurt out his name.

_Dan._

He turns and finally he can really see her. Not Mrs. Chuck Bass. Not the woman on the society page with her plastic smile. He can finally see Blair, stripped bare for him, standing there, ripped wide open, playing with her wedding ring that burns like fire on her finger, not knowing what to say, not able to say what she really wants to.

She wakes up.

The highball does end up smashing against the wall that night and for the first time in months Blair sobs and Chuck rages, and there is real feeling between them. He screams that he loved her, she doesn't answer, because she loved him too. Some time long ago, she loved him too. Not everything they've become was based on a lie.

She is done with her part, done playing out the childish dream of Meant to Be, and when they have both screamed and wept and are finally spent, Chuck on the leather couch with his head in his hands, Blair not caring that her mascara has streaked down her cheeks, she tells him what she should have told him in the first place.

She is leaving.

She never should have come back, should never have stood on the roof of the hotel and begged him to take her back, should never have followed him. Blair has finally been roused from the dream of the dream, and she can no longer pretend what they've become isn't wrong. She can't lie anymore. She tells him that he'll be okay, that there will be women lining up to comfort the great and mighty Chuck Bass, that he doesn't need her as much as he thinks. He looks up at her, glaring, and spits out that there already have been other women, trying to hurt her, because Chuck Bass doesn't like to lose. Blair doesn't blink because she already knows.

She wakes up.

In the middle of the night when they have talked in circles to the point that there is nothing left that hasn't been said ten times over, they are done. Blair takes her coat from the closet and walks towards the elevator. She steps out of the elevator and walks through the lobby, pushes through the heavy doors and ends up standing on the sidewalk, staring up at the night sky.

Chuck is still on the couch, his head still in his hands, and underneath all his anger is something else. Relief.

She ends up standing at the door of the loft, not sure if she should push it open, not sure if she should lift her hand and knock. Blair stares down at her left hand, at the ring there, and suddenly she needs it off her hand, away from her skin, so she tugs at it and it slides off, then she throws it down the stairwell. Tears sting her eyes. She turns around and he's standing in the doorway, watching her, the light of the room shining from behind him and casting his face in shadows.

Blair steps forward, reaches for him, wants him to grab her, take her in his arms, tell her that she has his heart forever, but he doesn't move, doesn't say anything, and she knows that this isn't about Dan. This isn't his responsibility. It's hers.

Blair needs to make this right.

She opens her mouth, then closes it, watches him, and even if he turns her away, tells her they cannot go back to what they were or even forward toward something different, she knows that from this moment on she will live her life with the authenticity she's been missing. She sees now that she was chasing things she thought she needed instead of the things that really meant something, that her dreams have led her down the wrong path.

Blair opens her mouth again and finally the words come, the ones that have been lurking in the recesses of her mind since the day she stood on top of the Empire and begged Chuck to take her back. The words that have been nagging at her, whispering at her in her dreams. The words she had tried pretend meant nothing when they actually meant everything.

_I made a mistake. _

~fin~


End file.
